Critical Thinking:

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CRITICAL THINKING

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course

Instructor

Date

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CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking is applying skill full conceptualizing, synthesizing, analyzing, or

evaluating any information or data given or acquired through experience, observation, reflection,

or reasoning for an action to be accepted. Critical thinking in my daily life plays several roles,

especially when I was in college. I used critical thinking to solve class assignments and avoid

depending on the lecturers. In my profession, as a teacher, I use critical thinking in creating

student's class assignments. However, over the past few days, I encountered a situation whereby

critical thinking was required to solve the problem at hand. As a teacher’s fraternity, the board

requested us to find possible solutions on how to significantly improve students' performance in

our school (Fisher, 2011). Therefore, the problem at hand required the use of critical thinking

skills since the way to success may not significantly be accessed through secondary information

since situations may not be similar. Consequently, the success of our students depended on our

creativity to create competitive skills to support the students.

There are barriers to critical thinking, which involve a lack of knowledge, willingness,

and closed-mindedness. Lacking knowledge means that an individual does not know exactly how

to apply critical thinking skills. Willingness is a barrier to critical thinking since thinking

critically does not necessarily depend on how skilled an individual is but the willingness to think

critically. Close-mindedness is another significant barrier to critical thinking since it requires that

a person be open-minded and welcome ideas. I had encountered the three barriers of critical

thinking, whereby first is when I entered into a disagreement with my colleague over the student

policies. However, I did know exactly how to apply the skills to solve the conflict. On the

willingness, part is that I once was elected as the leader of a student welfare body in an

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institution. Still, his willingness to solve the student's problems is what led me to perform poorly

due to not applying critical thinking skills to sustain the position or perform better.

Additionally, close-mindedness occurred when I fixed problems into a structured way of

solving problems as a student welfare leader. Additionally, I can place myself on level two of

cognitive development, which is relativism. The reason for placing myself in the relativism stage

is because I believe that there are reasons to solutions of a particular problem and viewed under a

particular context. Significantly, to move to the last stage of commitments requires that I earn

specifically through personal experience to aid my judgments and conclusions (King, 1978).

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References

Fisher, A. (2011). Critical thinking: An introduction. Cambridge university press.

https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wMhBQ0WdjF4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR1&

dq=critical+thinking&ots=q34oswTPOW&sig=X9RtVybuoRjfAGtLVd25SWlucuA&red

ir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=critical%20thinking&f=false

King, P. M. (1978). William Perry's theory of intellectual and ethical development. New

directions for student services, 1978(4), 35-51.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ss.37119780405